You’re sold on RSS. You go to your IT department and tell them you’re going to offer a slew of feeds over the company’s Web site. And IT laughs you out of their office. It’s not that they don’t like RSS. It’s that they want to preserve precious bandwidth. There’s a joke make the rounds among IT types that it’s hard to tell the difference between having successful RSS feeds on your site and suffering a distributed denial of service attack.

It’s not an imagined problem. If you offer, say, 10 feeds on your site and 10,000 people subscribe to each with readers that check the feeds every five minutes, the strain on your company’s servers will be considerable. So tell your IT department about Bloglines, a service that compiles your RSS content on their databases so that access to heavily hit pages are met from a local cache. It’s called a “blog aggregation database” and it’s catching on. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Blogbot have all signed on.

SearchWebServices.com has the story; free registration is required to read it.

This may sound too nerdy for communicators to bother with, but it’s better to be armed with all the alternatives than to get shot down by IT without knowing how to make your case. Back in the days when all communication was print, communicators knew a hell of a lot about printing. I’ve long maintained we need the same level of knwoledge about today’s tools.